Grab Rails AntiPatternshere using the 35% off discount code ANTIPATTERNS. Enter the all caps code at checkout. It’s good for the ebook, epub, or print book. Enjoy!

Ruby. For a developer, the very word describes a world where art and code fall from your fingers like magic from the staff of Gandalf. Rails. An elegant framework for taming the wilds of the interwebs. Unbounded power and productivity await you from the command line all for the low low price of free; well that and typing rails. Typing rails at the command line creates new online universes. It is limitless power. It is the katana of the new digital samurai…. it makes all things online possible. Rails bakes 30 minute brownies in 20 minutes and ensures that you posses the fastest car in existence.

It also attracts a metric tonne of people who don’t know what they’re doing. A framework that’s so easy “A Cave Man Could Do It” (tm) is bound to attract more than it’s fair share of - well cavemen… and a few Force.com developers. These are people who have not RTFM and in some instances, never will. Infidels who soil the temple of Ruby, Rails and Sinatra with “eval” statements, unseemly for loops and Cargo Culted code.

Considering that the Ruby Community is a group of “doers” - bitching without proposing a solution is weak sauce. So, here at Engine Yard we put on our thinking caps and tried to figure out a way to give back a little somethin-somethin to the community. Here’s what we came up with: If there are people out there that don’t know the right incantations to get the most out of Ruby and Rails, it’s our job to help them get all that information. It should not be our job to point and laugh at them…. well at least not until after we try to help them.

If you’re new to the Ruby community it’s not always easy to figure out where to go for good information about how to get off on the right foot. So, today we’re inaugurating a grand experiment: Ruby RTFM. We want to make it easy for everyone to write better Ruby, so we’re partnering with authors, publishers, blog editors and anyone who can assemble a technically accurate, marginally coherent, sentence to offer books and information for free when we can, and as close to free as the publishers will let us.

Our first foray into this brave new world comes from two well known names in the Ruby Community, Chad Pytel (Founder, ThoughtBot) and Tammer Saleh (Ex ThoughtBot, current Engine Yarder), authors of Rails AntiPatterns. We couldn’t think of a better way to improve the Ruby and Rails code that we see (and cry about) on a daily basis than by giving people an exhaustive set of examples of what not to do. And before you see this for the shameless promotion of a friends book that this is, realize that Tammer owes me money for a bar tab and I’m afraid that the 35% discount that Engine Yard is sponsoring for his book is going to leave him owing me money, and my boss wondering how I managed to buy a few thousand PDFs on my expense report… but that’s neither here nor there.

Grab the book here and use the 35% off discount code ANTIPATTERNS for as long as my credit card works. Enter the code in all caps at checkout. It’s good for the print book, or the ebook/epub.

Likewise, don’t forget to join our new discount books and screencast email list. We’ll only use your email to notify you about new Ruby and Cloud informational resources available on the cheap. Or you can follow @engineyard on Twitter, find us on Facebook, or join our Engine Yard Community Group on LinkedIn. We’ll be linking to the discount codes and content as fast as we can.

If nothing else check out the Cloud Out Loud Podcast, and experience our shameless support for people who write books for our community. This week the podcast features none other than the Runner Up for the sexiest man in Open Source Software, Tammer Saleh (heh heh, if you don’t believe me listen to the podcast and search the google cache).

As far as we’re concerned, this is a community effort. If you’re writing a book that can help the community write better Ruby applications, get in touch with us at RTFM@engineyard.com. We want to figure out how to get that information into the hands of as many Rubyists as possible. If you have an idea for writing a book, then read Jeremy McAnally’s book on how to write an e-book and drop us a line when you have a draft. We want books for Rubyists by Rubyists on all the stuff that Ruby people need to know. And even though he doesn’t know it yet, Danish Khan just volunteered to keep a running list of the best resources for getting started with Ruby on Rails. If all this seems too “elementary” for your advanced Rails Brain - then check out José Valim’s Crafting Rails Applications - even Carlhuda could learn something here.

At its best, building software is about the judicious mixture of art and information. At its worst, software is a quagmire of terrible ideas expressed in even worse code. Our mission is ensuring no Ruby developer writes bad code because he couldn’t afford the PDF, or the bar tab at a GitHub drink up that would have gained her the insight into how to write Ruby the right way. One of the strongest assets in the Ruby world is our community and culture of sharing. Share what you know about Ruby and the Cloud with anyone and everyone who will listen. Inside every .Net developer is a metaprogramming guru waiting to be born. (Behind every .NET developer is a soulless IT shop that loves mind numbing control, but I digress…)